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Sunday, May 27, 2012

Activity 14 - 30 days of leadership

I had always planned to do an activity on leadership and since I am currently trying to start a movement I thought that this would be a good time to focus on the topic.

The talks

There are quite a number of talks that I could have used for this activity, but the talks I have chosen are:

Barry Schwartz on our loss of wisdom - I love this talk, I think that I have watched it about 10 times. It introduced me to the concept of moral will and moral skill, which puts a theory around something that I knew was broken in our working environment.

There is a chance that I might include another talk or two, there are a couple on the periphery that could very well be introduced, but we'll see.

The challenge

This is another one of those challenges that will be quite easy for me to outline but will be extremely difficult to execute. I don't currently manage any teams at work, I will have a project team shortly but that is unlikely to do anything much until July/August. But leadership isn't about management, it something altogether different and I do have a leadership position in my current working environment.

From Barry's talk I will be trying to find a way that we can empower staff to use their own initiative and decision making skills for their roles. From David's talk, and particularly David and Steve Zaffron's book, I will be focusing on working out the operating level of the tribes I am part of and then seeing whether I can use the three laws to move them forward.

The activity

There are two aspects to this activity. The first is based around the Challenge your preconceptions movement and ensuring that any leadership that I do around this activity align with Barry and David's talks. But that requires me to get a tribe going, so there has to be a more practical aspect for this, which leads us to the second aspect.

This is the main part of the activity, and it is centred around by working environment. It will involve the following tasks:

identifying any aspects of our working environment where we can better empower our staff around applying practical wisdom, or moral will and moral skill.

working out the operating level of the tribes in my working environment, including my immediate office, the broader group, our smaller unit and the project team that I will be managing

once I have worked this out, using the three laws I will see if there is any way that I can help the tribes move to a higher level of performance.

This might be a particularly difficult activity to write about, given the nature of some of the things I might be trying to change and influence, but I will be as open about these experiences as I feel I can be, especially given that work colleagues do read the blog.